“Well aware of both the continuity and contingency of human affairs, Adams and Madison searched the works of Tacitus and Voltaire and Locke like carpenters rummaging through their assortment of tools, knowing that all the pediments were jury-rigged, all the provisional, all the alliances temporary.”

Time Lines, p. 64
Waiting For The Barbarians (1997)

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Lewis H. Lapham 34
American journalist 1935

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